A common question visitors ask in the reconstructed carpenter shop at
Fort Vancouver NHS is whether
Hudson's Bay Company carpenters used nails in
construction and other purposes, and if so where did they
come from.

Carpenter shop volunteers, in turn, commonly
describe the
post-on-sill construction of Fort Vancouver buildings as
requiring no nails or other metal fasteners, except for
those in the floorboards and to attach roofing material. So
were nails used?

Archaeological evidence says yes, as 15,227
nails of various sizes and configurations (as well as header
tools used by blacksmiths in making nails) had turned up in
excavations conducted on the site from the late 1940s up
through the mid-1970s. As to where they came from, the two
logical sources would seem to be hammered out in the post
blacksmith shop, or made in Europe and brought on the annual
supply ship.(1)

To approach these questions some context
beyond the Pacific Northwest frontier is useful.
By the 1830s what has
been called the
First Industrial Revolution
was
well underway in Europe. Following the adaptation of the
steam engine for industrial use in the late 1700s
Britain took the lead in applying steam power to mechanized
production in factories that produced many basic and
standardized items much more abundantly and cheaply than was
previously possible. With the invention of
nail making machines in the late 1700s, nails joined
textiles among the many items that began to be
mass produced.(2)

These developments meant that many things that previously
had been made in small quantities by labor-intensive manual
methods could be purchased in bulk from manufacturers at
lower cost.
Fort Vancouver
Hudson’s Bay Company
era
was on an isolated frontier, the far edge of the
Europe-centered commercial networks. But the Company's
business was commerce, and as long as the maritime
connection was maintained it could acquire just about
whatever Europe could provide.

The detailed invoice for European products that arrived
at Fort Vancouver on the barque 'Brothers' in 1844 for
Outfit 1845 (which I have used previously in discussing
blankets and capots and
beaver traps) lists no fewer than 430 thousand nails of
various types and sizes coming from London in a single
shipment. Two hundred thousand were for attaching roof
shingles, leaving nearly a quarter of a million nails in
sizes from one inch to seven inches. See the full list
below.

Fort Vancouver blacksmiths might have needed to make
nails and spikes on occasion or for special purposes, and
more nails may have been made on site in the early years at
the Vancouver location. But in view of the supplies
coming in from English factories by the mid-1840s it would
have been wasteful of the time and talents of skilled smiths
to put them to work hammering out small nails in large
quantities.

This is the full list of nails delivered to Fort
Vancouver in the barque 'Brothers' in 1844. I retain the
Roman numeral "M" as it appears in HBC shipping lists and
inventories, to indicate one thousand. The "d" indicates the
"penny" size of the nails following English
nail size
conventions still in use in the USA:

1 M
round boat nails 2 3/4 inch

2 M 2d brad nails

5 M 3d brad nails

6 M 4d brad nails

6 M 6d brad nails

20
M brass chair nails

8 M 10d clasp nails

10
M 24d clinch nails

10
M 36d clinch nails

7 M die head deck nails 5 inches

5 M die head deck nails 6 inches

3 M die head deck nails 7 inches

7 M
die head deck nails 7 13/20 inches fine draw

1 M
counter plough nails 2 3/4 inches

1 M
counter plough nails 2 inches

8 M
cooper's 3d rose nails

50 M
14d fine drawn rose nails

50 M
20d find drawn rose nails

10 M
24d fine drawn rose nails

10 M 30d fine drawn rose nails

200
M 4d fine drawn shingling nails

5 M
2d clout head tack nails

5 M
4 ounce machine tack nails

The cost of these nails to the Company was £115.1s.1d, or
just over 115 pounds sterling. The Measuring
Worth online calculator suggests that would amount to
about $13,000 in today's dollars. (3)

NOTES:

(1) Another possible source of nails recovered archaeologically
was USA manufacture, resulting from US Army occupation of
the original HBC fort after HBC left the site. The nails
recovered included 7,794 of wrought rod (51%), but the
method and location of manufacture, whether manual or
industrial, or in Europe or at Fort Vancouver, are
undetermined. There were also 7,493 cut nails (49%), which
could not have been made at Fort Vancouver. These findings
are discussed in detail in Lester
A. Ross, “Fort Vancouver, 1829-1860: A Historical
Archaeological Investigation of the Goods Imported and
Manufactured by the Hudson’s Bay Company,” (Typescript, Fort
Vancouver NHS, 1976), pp. 902-922.

I thank Heidi Pierson, Museum Specialist on the staff
of Fort Vancouver NHS, for pointing out that archaeological
evidence suggests more hand-wrought nails were used in the
HBC era than might be suggested by looking at one shipment
arriving from England in 1844.

In the course of working up this posting I came across
an extensive
bibliography of literature on the history of nails and
their interpretation in archaeology and historical
restoration, available
HERE.

(2) While child labor was common in the 19th
century, the advent of nail-making machinery should get us
past the image of workshops full of 10 year-old boys
manually pounding out nails with hammer and anvil, from
heated iron rod stock. It is well known that Thomas Jefferson, who as US President
purchased Louisiana Territory in 1803 and famously sent
Lewis & Clark to explore it, also had a nail making
operation at his Monticello plantation, which employed
slaves to
make nails by hand from nail rod. In 1796
Jefferson acquired a
nail making machine that used hoop iron to make 4d
brads. The 1844 shipment discussed here included many sizes and
shapes of iron and steel bar and rod stock, but nothing
called "nail rod." The smallest is “bolt rod” of 1/4”
diameter.

(3) The full listing of the
1844 shipment is in Lester A. Ross, “Fort Vancouver,
1829-1860: A Historical Archaeological Investigation of the
Goods Imported and manufactured by the Hudson’s Bay
Company,” (Typescript, Fort Vancouver NHS,1976), Appendix
II, pp. 1,384-1,410. Nails are listed on pp. 1,400-1.

Tom Holloway is a historian who got interested in the
history of everyday tools and technology about 20 years ago.
About the same time he began working to acquire a modicum of
skill in woodworking and blacksmithing using traditional
methods and manual techniques, on a hobby basis.

After retiring in 2009 and moving to Portland, Oregon, he
began to volunteer in the reenactment craft shops at
Fort
Vancouver National Historic Site in Vancouver, Washington.
He is now the Lead Volunteer in the carpenter shop, where
the work focuses on smaller woodworking projects, since
building construction is not currently going on there.

Fort Vancouver was the regional headquarters of the
Hudson's
Bay Company activities west of the Rocky Mountains from 1824
to 1846. Volunteer blacksmiths and carpenters work in
the two shops to demonstrate those crafts as they might have
been practiced in the early 1840s, and provide historical
interpretation to people visiting the site. To improve
the quantity and quality of information for shop operation
and interpretation, Tom began to dig into sources on the
history of Hudson's Bay Company, Fort Vancouver
specifically, and the fur trade era more generally. In June
2012 he began to share some of the results of that research
on his blog,
"Fur Fort Fun Facts."

Tom is not a stranger on this website. He translates
articles we receive from Spanish and Portuguese into
English, including translating several of the articles by
Diego de Assis
posted on this site.